John Scalzi: Being Poor

[Dragonfli]

19. "Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so."

I find that is true of almost everyone that has been lucky enough, or born well enough to have avoided it.

Once you live it, even if you were middle class until you turned 10 and your step dad was laid off with thousands of other union workers, it will change you forever, even if you get a lucky break and develop a trade and stop missing meals and get to work out of teenage homelessness, eventually find someone you love that makes you forget sometimes your now alcoholic step-father is no longer capable of love, only inflicting pain on those he once loved.

You never ever again feel sure you won't go back to missed meals, and homelessness, and abusive attacks where love should be, never, and now you are getting old and the choice is again not yours, why?

The comfortable have made the choice for you, the comfortable trade away your pension, your SS trust fund, your health care, your "choice" not to be poor.

One thing you will never forget, is the choice is seldom yours to make, the secure and middle class and wealthy feel it's your choice, but all too often you have no choice and the comfortable that think it's a choice, start making choices that affect you and not them, they take away your choice and create more poor, more misery, and more lost dreams.

They start to choose to trade away the programs that prevent poverty for the promise of a middle way, an expediente deal, to "get people elected" that will make more deals that create more poor and take away the choice from more, the cycle continues, it is not pragmatism, it is making the choice FOR the poor to be poor, and taking away their chance to "choose" not to be.

I know all this to be true myself.